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The ideas and innovators shaping health care | | | | |  | | By Carmen Paun, Ruth Reader, Ben Leonard and Erin Schumaker | | | | |  Malawi, one of the world's poorest countries, is experiencing its worst cholera outbreak in two decades. | AP | | | "We’re not talking about hot or cold water or jacuzzi."
Philippe Barboza of the World Health Organization on the basic needs of countries fighting cholera | | A scourge from the past has returned. Climate change and conflict are supercharging cholera, a diarrheal disease caused by ingesting contaminated water and food, killing thousands of people from Haiti to Malawi. More people died of cholera last year globally than in the previous five years combined, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization’s director-general, said. Nearly 20 countries are battling outbreaks, and not enough vaccines are available to immunize all those at risk. One billion people — that’s 1 in 8 — are at direct risk, according to the WHO. “It’s very sad that, in 2023, we’re losing people to a disease that by and large can be prevented by handwashing and clean and safe drinking water,” Chalilwe Chungu, a Zambian doctor who’s treated cholera patients, told Carmen. What’s needed: Safe drinking water and access to toilets. Those basics eliminated cholera in developed countries, but they’re still not widely available in many developing ones. The WHO dealt with major cholera outbreaks in the past but one at the time. “Now we have major fires in many different places of the world at the same time,” said Philippe Barboza, the WHO’s lead on cholera. That’s because extreme weather events, such as successive tropical cyclones in Malawi and an early and strong monsoon in Bangladesh, cause floods, contaminating water and displacing people. Last fall, the WHO and other organizations jointly managing a stockpile of oral cholera vaccines decided to immunize people with one dose instead of the usual two to reach as many as possible. All the 35 million cholera vaccine doses produced last year were shipped and used, Barboza said. The only remaining active manufacturer, EuBiologics in South Korea, is scaling up production, he said, but that’s expected to only deliver more doses in 2024. A South Africa-based manufacturer that wants to enter the cholera market will need years to ramp up, Barboza said.
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| Hard hit: The rise in cases in Africa is exponential. The number of cases recorded in January 2023 alone is already a third of the total number of cases recorded in 2022, the WHO regional office for the continent said Thursday. Malawi is experiencing its worst outbreak in two decades, with more than 40,000 cases and nearly 1,400 deaths to date. The government launched a campaign Monday to interrupt cholera transmission by the end of February by increasing access to prevention, treatment, safe water and food and sanitation and informing people about how they can protect themselves. Elsewhere on the continent, more than 300 people have died in Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria. Meanwhile, Haiti has reported some 560 deaths. Gang violence, political instability and a lack of resources are to blame for the resurgence of the disease more than climate change there. Haitian cholera treatment centers are substandard, “so we’re working to ensure they have the appropriate human resources support, medical commodities and supplies to be able to treat cholera patients,” said Adib Fletcher, who’s working in Haiti with Project HOPE, a humanitarian relief group.
| | | | STEP INSIDE THE WEST WING: What's really happening in West Wing offices? Find out who's up, who's down, and who really has the president’s ear in our West Wing Playbook newsletter, the insider's guide to the Biden White House and Cabinet. For buzzy nuggets and details that you won't find anywhere else, subscribe today. | | | | | | | | |  Auburn, Ala. | AP | This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care. While love languages are a popular first date topic, there's scant evidence to back up the theory that couples who share a preference for one of the languages described in Gary Chapman's 1992 best seller The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts have better relationships. So says Gery Karantzas, a professor at Deakin University in Australia who has reviewed the research on the five languages: acts of service, physical touch, quality time, gifts and words of affirmation. The handful of studies done on love languages are largely inconclusive, Karantzas writes in The Conversation. Chapman argued that couples who gravitated to one of those methods of communication were more likely to be satisfied. Share any thoughts, news, tips and feedback with Ben Leonard at bleonard@politico.com, Ruth Reader at rreader@politico.com, Carmen Paun at cpaun@politico.com or Erin Schumaker at eschumaker@politico.com. Send tips securely through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp. Today on our Pulse Check podcast, your host Ruth talks with Daniel Payne about the Biden administration's proposed rule to require more transparency about the owners, managers and contractors at nursing homes, in part to better understand private equity’s impact on the industry.
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Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has formed an unlikely alliance with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on tech regulation. | AP | A desire to regulate America’s biggest tech companies is one of the few things that Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill can agree on. That point was made plain during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on protecting children online on Tuesday. Conservative Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said he was working on a consumer protection bill with Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — a senator on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum — to create a regulator for the industry. Witnesses — a mix that included mental health advocates, child-trafficking experts, and individuals and families harmed by social media — spoke about cyberbullying and child sexual exploitation. They also said that algorithms expose kids to content that harms their psyches and causes them to become addicted to social media. More research needed? The chief science officer of the American Psychological Association, Mitch J. Prinstein, asked senators to demand more transparency from social media platforms so psychologists can study social media’s effects. What’s Next: There was bipartisan support last year in Congress for a data privacy bill and another aimed at protecting kids online. Neither passed, but lawmakers have shown keen interest in getting legislation across the finish line in 2023. Graham wants to create a new regulatory agency to set rules for content moderation and privacy protection at social media companies and reform Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which protects the tech firms from liability for users’ posts that break the law. He also plans to reintroduce his EARN IT Act, which would strip tech firms that host child pornography of their Section 230 protections. Graham first broached the idea of a new tech regulator last September, saying then that he wanted to create a “regulatory environment with teeth.”
| | | | LISTEN TO POLITICO'S ENERGY PODCAST: Check out our daily five-minute brief on the latest energy and environmental politics and policy news. Don't miss out on the must-know stories, candid insights, and analysis from POLITICO's energy team. Listen today. | | | | | | | | |  Anytime is game time. | Getty Images | Parents know their kids’ screen time grew during the Covid-19 pandemic’s first year of lockdown. A study published in JAMA Network Open puts a number on the increase: 40 percent more time. And that doesn’t include the time they spent on Zoom school. Before the coronavirus arrived, the 228 kids in the study spent, on average, four hours a day watching videos and another half hour on homework or playing educational games, reported researchers from Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Dartmouth and other universities. After Covid shuttered schools and activities and put the kibosh on play dates, total average screen time for the kids — all between ages 4 and 12 — jumped more than two hours, with educational use apart from school increasing to 1.5 hours and recreational use to 5.3 hours. Between May and August 2021, screen time fell to about 6 hours but remained well above pre-pandemic levels, despite the lifting of most Covid restrictions during that time. In addition to outfitting their avatars on Roblox and fighting to the death virtually on Fortnite, the number of kids who had social media accounts during the pandemic increased from 4.4 to 11.2 percent, the researchers found. What’s next: Despite their concerns, the researchers acknowledged that it hasn't been conclusively determined yet that additional screen time is bad for kids’ health. They called for: — Families to “re-establish healthy screen time usage” — More guidance from pediatricians on screen time — More research into the association between screen time and obesity and mental illness “It will be important to understand the long-term health impacts of the increased screen time and whether they vary by type of screen time,” the researchers wrote. “The long-term association of increased screen time during the COVID-19 pandemic with children’s health needs to be determined.” | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |  |
